Melissa Bowers
Author
Melissa is a SAG-AFTRA actress and former high school teacher from Michigan who (reluctantly) moved across the country when she was six months pregnant. She is the winner of the 2025 Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize in Prose and a past winner of the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest, the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize (selected by Susanna Kaysen, author of Girl, Interrupted), the F(r)iction flash fiction competition, and The Writer‘s inaugural personal essay contest.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, HuffPost, Scary Mommy, and The Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Melissa has been shortlisted for both the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and her stories were recently selected for The Best Small Fictions anthology as well as the Wigleaf Top 50. Melissa is represented by Jill Marr of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
Popular Posts
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This Morning, When You Left for Kindergarten
Here is what I see when I look at you: a squishy belly tethered to me by a miraculous cord. Doll-sized newborn diapers, still somehow too big. Wrinkled fists and rocking chairs and receiving blankets. Peach-fuzz hair like velvet against my cheek. Where has the time gone? This summer, we stored another bin of clothes…
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Teachers, You Should Watch What You’re Doing
The second you decided to step in front of a classroom, you agreed to spend your day on a stage. They are watching you all the time: the students, the administration, the parents, the media, the world. They are looking at your test scores. They are examining your data. They are hoping you will be…
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The Space Between Baby and Boy
We’re in it now, this space between baby and boy. We’re teetering, delicately and precariously, a roller coaster in its graceful pause just before the plunge. It was a little rickety at first, climbing that steep, steep slope: Sleepless nights. Endless spit-up. Needless crying. I felt each click click click of the ascent. But for now, we are floating…
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A Love Letter to Michigan
My beloved Mitten, When I left last year, I knew, absolutely, I would miss you. Somehow I always understood that you are special — even as a child, even when my then-boyfriend-now-husband-who-is-from-Virginia called you “kinda flat,” even when I was nineteen years old and it was winter in Ann Arbor and I had to lean into a blizzard on the blustery walk…
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Well, That Escalated Quickly: Behind the Scenes of a Perplexingly Polarizing Post
This is a post about irony. Well, mostly. The last couple weeks have demonstrated that an alarming number of people are super confused when it comes to identifying the underlying theme of something (which makes the English teacher in me curl up in a ball and sob a little bit). So this time, I feel like maybe it’s important to…
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I Cannot in Good Conscience Participate in the Love Your Spouse Challenge
My marriage is not as perfect as yours. Seven years and two kids later, Facebook has absolutely convinced me of this. Written declarations of true love are forever cascading down my feed: You are my soul mate, baby boo-boo sugar lips. My one true love. I would never want to spend this life with anyone else…
